The justification for erasing America’s historic injustices, claiming that knowing them causes kids to feel guilt or shame, is a high priority for our current right wing government. Trump and his ilk make this sound like a noble cause—protecting kids from carrying the factual and emotional burdens of history. Think how much more uncomplicated and […]
“. . . an act of cruelty . . . was the ancient irresistible rejoicing of power over weakness.” – Tony Hoagland “You cannot follow both Christ and the cruelty of kings. A leader who mocks the weak, exalts himself, and preys on the innocent is not sent by God. He is sent to test […]
I intended to write about immigrants. About our government’s demonization of immigrants. About the reasons people flee their homes, abandon their extended families and communities, take enormous risks and suffer humiliating hardships to get to some safer and healthier place. I wanted to talk about some of the people in this portrait collection who are from immigrant families—like Dr. […]
Some people use a recording of rain’s soothing white noise to put themselves to sleep. I like to be woken up by the real thing. My house is surrounded by old red oaks and on a warm, quiet night—the windows wide—a sudden downpour startles me happily awake, the oak leaves twitching and twittering like a million […]
Yesterday afternoon, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m., 17 men and women dressed all in black, stood in a line on the street in the little village of Blue Hill, Maine. Each of us held an empty pot, open end toward the road, and a wooden spoon. We were bearing witness to the starvation in Gaza enforced by […]
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all crueltyto know what occurs but not recognize the fact. – William Stafford, from A Ritual to Read to Each Other I don’t want to be writing this. Probably there are better things for me to be doing. Especially because the massacre in Gaza has been […]
A friend asked me to write a little essay about being astonished. Astonished? . . . My first thought was a glass of cool water. Drinking it. The mysterious and momentary sublimity of that. Its sensuous, animal satisfaction, its poetic wonder. And then, water itself. A miracle. What is the direct line from the Big Bang to […]
“It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.” — Huck Finn
Right below the surface, like the rotting body of a drowned Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, is the stinking, smug racism of Donald Trump as he attempts to remove institutionalized efforts toward Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) from governmental, educational, and corporate practice. He wants white people to feel victimized by DEI – as though five-hundred […]
“Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. . . . Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for the law: it invites every man to become a law unto himself, it invites anarchy.” – Louis Brandeis Friends, I just watched the second inauguration of Donald Trump. I suspect many […]